Category Archives: GMOs

I recently received this warning from one of my favorite food safety organizations.

“The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is taking comments on a dangerous proposal that will put our farms, our food, and our environment at risk.

The EPA is proposing a dramatic expansion of the use of the toxic pesticide Enlist Duo. Enlist Duo is a mixture of glyphosate (the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup®) and the even more toxic 2,4-D (part of the chemical mixture Agent Orange). If approved the pesticide cocktail could be used on corn, soy, and cotton in 34 states — up from 15 states where the product was previously approved for just corn and soy.

The rush to expand the use of Dow AgroSciences’ toxic chemical concoction of glyphosate and 2,4-D for use on the next generation of genetically engineered crops comes only one year after the EPA asked a court to revoke its previous approval due to the unknown risks it posed, and now EPA suddenly wants to more than double the number of states where the pesticide can be used.”

Unfortunately we will likely see an acceleration of such proposals under the Trump administration. Trump has discussed terminating the EPA altogether. It is going to be a difficult four years for food safety.

The discussion covers several important issues. To Pique your interest in reading further here are a few salient quotes.

Glyphosate is the most used herbicide in the world, the pride and joy (as well as a great cash cow) of mega-giant chemical manufacturer Monsanto. Although ubiquitous as Roundup® and generally presented for many decades as safe for humans and animals, in 2015 The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) of the World Health Organization labeled glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”[3]

The European Union (EU) is trying to determine whether Monsanto should have its license to sell Roundup renewed this year. With that renewal in mind, in the spring of 2016, 48 members of the EU Parliament, representing 13 nations, volunteered to have their urine tested for glyphosate. All were found positive by a German lab.[4] In May 2016, a University of California, San Francisco, lab working for The Detox Project, funded by concerned individuals, reported positive urine tests for glyphosate in 93% of 131 urine samples from across the United States.[5]

Is this widespread presence of glyphosate in humans incidental and harmless or are we all in danger of being poisoned by this Monsanto product? That is a very good question.

Remember the gut microbiome? We are learning a great deal about how it influences so much of human health. There is a project called Qmulus, at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and funded in part by Quanta Computers of Taiwan. Under its auspices, authors Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff, in a 40-plus-page review[6] with 286 references, paint a very troubling picture of glyphosate’s inhibition of cytochrome P450 enzymes. For example, one role of this enzyme is to detoxify xenobiotics. The authors propose that the consequences of this inhibition, when coupled with other synergistic disruptions, may insidiously induce many diseases associated with a Western diet, including diabetes, obesity, cancer, autism, Alzheimer’s, and others.

A 2015 paper[7] by the same authors takes these and new findings and deductions even further to manganese deficiency in cows fed genetically modified Roundup Ready feed. This update is 55 pages long with 328 supporting references. Both are in open access; peruse them if you choose. [Editor’s note: Links to the full text of these papers are included with the references.]

If you want to learn more about Roundup, GMOs, and the worsening global threat to our food safety (no exaggeration) you can learn more by visiting www.CenterForFoodSafety.org.

I learned about this organization while watching the film The Future of Food. Although this hit the screens in 2004 it is still worth watching. If you think ROUNDUP is safe or that GMO foods are OK, think again. At least give this movie and website a look before you settle back into contentment with Monsanto and all the other bad actors in the food-seed-pesticide industry making decisions that WILL destroy the ability of farmers in the US and possibly world-wide to use their own seeds.

Monsanto has genetically engineered and patented a suicide gene and placed it into all of it’s seeds (cotton, soy, corn) so that farmers must buy seeds EVERY YEAR. This seed produces crops whose seeds are sterile. If this seed is carried by wind, animals, or other common mechanisms, from Monsanto’s’ crops to non-GMO fields, the gene will hybridize with natural seed crops and after several generations render a majority of crops infertile.

Monsanto produces not just pesticides but pesticide resistant seeds that produce sterile crops. Monsanto is playing monopoly and quickly eliminating independent seed producers and destroying family farms that have every year used their own seeds which have been bred to thrive in the local environment of the family farm.

Other issues abound. Roundup resistant crops, eaten by American consumers, have high levels of ROUNDUP and other pesticides that have been demonstrated to cause tumors in > 50% of animals within 1 year. Monsanto only tested ROUNDUP for 3 months in animal studies and declared it safe. The USDA did not test it. The FDA did not test it. Government scientists and university scientists who expressed concerns were silenced by the economic power of this massive multi-national corporation.

When independent scientists published their alarming results (carcinogenesis), Monsanto used it’s financial resources to shut those scientists down. You can learn about this by watching The Future of Food or visiting www.CenterForFoodSafety.org.

Like big Pharma executives cycling between the pharmaceutical industry and the FDA, Monsanto executives and lawyers cycle in and out of the FDA and USDA. We have allowed the fox to guard the chicken pen and the stakes are high. Family farms have been put out of business by Monsanto’s unethical and predatory behavior, eliminating generations of private seed banks and wreaking havoc for family farms across America. Don’t believe it? Watch the movie. Many farmers have gone bankrupt fighting legal battles with Monsanto because the wind has blown Monsanto’s patented seeds onto their private lands and Monsanto successfully sued them for patent infringement. This predatory behavior has been going on below the radar for many years and it started when the Supreme Court ruled that Monsanto can patent seeds.

In fact, Monsanto has gone into the US national seed banks, collected samples of thousands of different seeds, and patented them! This outrageous and ridiculous scenario has allowed a private company to patent thousands of heritage crop seeds.

If this sounds incredible, you are right, but it is true.

In the meantime, support mandatory GMO labeling and support food retailers who have promised to carry only NON-GMO foods.